Retail

About Fitness Superstore

Founded in 1994, Fitness Superstore is the largest supplier of specialist fitness equipment in the UK and with 9 showrooms throughout the UK they have a net turnover in excess of 27 million and employ more than 70 staff nationwide.

"AZTech IT are an extremely responsive, capable and a flexible company. They understand the demands placed on a retail business. They provide solutions that deliver ongoing value and mitigate business risk. We have developed a strong partnership with them and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them"

Paul Walker
Managing Director

Fitness-Superstore-logo
BPS

Company: Fitness Superstore

Sector: Retail

Location:UK Wide

The Challenge

Back in 2010 Fitness Superstore assessed the market to identify a new IT partner.

During this time, they were opening new and additional stores as part of their growth. It was identified and decided there was a need to upgrade the WAN (wide area network) infrastructure as well as local head office IT infrastructure.

This would provide a highly resilient solution allowing remote location workers to access critical business applications with fast and reliable connections.

Fitness superstore had a large server estate containing a lot of historical data. Transactions were being made both via the online store and in the 9 store locations at any point of the day or night. This meant there was an extremely limited amount of downtime available.

Transitions of systems and business applications needed to be seamless without impacting business or trading.

The Solution

After several site audits and project management meetings, AZTech implemented a resilient WAN Solution with failover connectivity to provide full uptime to critical systems.

Ageing servers and hardware were replaced with new infrastructure and virtualised in a Hyper V clustered environment.

By moving to a fully virtualised solution with standby failover machines, Fitness Superstore no longer needed to worry about hardware failures.

A solid backup, and D/R solution was also implemented providing off-site recovery to a Tier 4 data centre for all critical systems and applications. for future growth for this expanding retailer.

Implementation and Results

The project was delivered over the course of six weeks and within this time we completed various physical to virtual conversions (P2V), with no downtime to their critical systems or website and email was migrated to a new platform also with zero downtime.

As part of testing we confirmed high availability and failover to our data centre.

The new infrastructure has resulted in a reduction of their server footprint and power consumption whilst increasing resiliency and continuity. It will also allow for future growth for this expanding retailer.

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